Has your old job – the one you held and then got downsized from – been lost for good?
I recently read a career article in the New York Times that referred to how many job that were eliminated in the past 2 year or so during the global economic slowdown are jobs that have simply disappeared for good.
Many positions were eliminated and the work was picked up by other staff members who remained on board. Now it’s like the old staff members never existed in the first place and the remaining staff were doing the extra work all along.
Sometimes job get eliminated due to new technology or when jobs simply become redundant and no longer necessary but in tough times companies also cut head count and ask the remaining staff to pick up the slack.
I remember back in university when I worked at a milk processing plant part time, the company decided to eliminate jobs by essentially eliminating a particular job in the production department and having each machine operator do the job themselves for their own machines rather than having a dedicated person to look after that part of the process for all machines as they were currently doing. They ended up eliminating 2 jobs X 2 shifts so 4 jobs were lost in total and the remaining machine operators simply picked up the tasks for their own machines and had that added to their job.
I remember some managers at the plant thinking that it was going to be difficult to get the operators to do the extra jobs since they weren’t used to doing them and they worked in a unionized environment and this would undoubtedly cause some trouble since jobs were being lost.
I remember thinking that I didn’t think it would be a problem long term because pretty quickly people would forget that there used to be a dedicated person doing the job and they’d forget that it didn’t use to be part of their role. Plus, since it was a union environment, people switched jobs and eventually they’d have different machine operators who didn’t know the difference since the change would have happened before their time.
And that’s pretty much what happened. A few weeks after making the change, everyone had gotten used to the changes and the company probably saved themselves over $120K per year in wages for the 4 people whose jobs had been eliminated. The company got by with doing more with fewer staff.
About 1 year after that, they then replaced all their filling machines with new models that ran 33% faster and which enabled them to wring even more efficiency out of the staff.
